> I'm starting to think it would've made more sense to allow unicode to allow to embed small vector icons directly in the text format.
Unicode folks are also feeling this pain and there have been multiple attempts to decouple the emoji business from Unicode: the closest to what you've described is the Coded Hashes of Arbitrary Images [1]. (The proposed encoding is wasteful but of course would have been improved if it were accepted.) Considering that the Unicode consortium is a consortium of vendors, this emoji business is suboptimal even for vendors. But there seems no particularly good way to efficiently and securely implement such mechanisms.
Interesting. Apparently TR-52 allows for arbitrarily long strings of tag values for emoji variants. So the standard could, theoretically anyway, allow an emoji variant that includes an entire PNG or SVG.
Unicode folks are also feeling this pain and there have been multiple attempts to decouple the emoji business from Unicode: the closest to what you've described is the Coded Hashes of Arbitrary Images [1]. (The proposed encoding is wasteful but of course would have been improved if it were accepted.) Considering that the Unicode consortium is a consortium of vendors, this emoji business is suboptimal even for vendors. But there seems no particularly good way to efficiently and securely implement such mechanisms.
[1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16105r-unicode-image-hash.p...